30 years ago today Ayrton Senna was killed at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola at the Tamburello corner on lap 7. The day before Roland Ratzenberger was killed at the Villeneuve kink in qualifying when his front wing detached & became wedged underneath the front wheels. On the Friday Rubén’s Barrichello survived a bad crash after exiting the Variante Bassa corner when his Jordan was launched into the air off a kerb.
A weekend that Formula One will never forget
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was 13. I didn't see any of the weekend live - it was the Challenge Cup Final on the Saturday and I was in London. Got back to the hotel on the Saturday evening and saw on the news that Ratzenberger had been killed. I couldn't believe it - to me at that age that kind of thing didn't happen in F1 anymore; the last driver killed in a race weekend had been Riccardo Paletti in 1982 (and of course Villeneuve a month earlier) but I was too young to remember that. They were names from history to me.
And then Sunday. My dad and I had been on the Lord's cricket ground tour; we came out and decided to use our mini handheld TV to check on the Grand Prix. The sound and picture was terrible and all we could make out was that there was no racing going on, and the camera was just showing the pit lane. (The BBC cut away from the world feed, which was showing pictures from a helicopter hovering over the crash site. The BBC deemed this inappropriate and cut to its own camera instead, but the helicopter footage was broadcast in full on Eurosport.) It was clear that something had happened but we had no idea what. We thought we heard mention of Senna. It was only when we got home that evening that we found out he had died.
I think that was Verstappen ( Senior ) in Germany? The fuelling hose detached while still pumping. Same year, though...?
Yes, same year - Hockenheim 1994. The reason for the fire was that the valve stuck open, and when they removed the nozzle from the car fuel was still flowing.
The investigation concluded that the valve had stuck open because of the presence of a foreign body, but also noted that Benetton had removed a filter from the valve, thus allowing fuel to flow into the car more quickly.
Oh i think now it was a wheel came off a car in the pits that hit a mechanic, there was an incident in the pits anyway, just another aspect to that cursed race!
It was Alboreto's car that had the wheel come off.
Another thing to note about the race was the incident involving Erik Comas. His car had been in the pits being repaired at the time Senna crashed and the race was stopped. The team finished the repairs and, inexplicably, sent him out of the pits. Even more inexplicably the marshals at the end of the pit lane let him out onto the track and he went tearing off down to Tamburello, where he encountered a blocked track, a medical helicopter... and Senna.
The most poignant thing about that is that two years earlier at Spa, Comas himself had crashed heavily and it was Senna who stopped his own car and went to Comas' aid, switching off his engine and holding his head until the medics arrived.